The Landscape Within. The Aesthetic Renegotiation of a Changing Environment in John Ruskin, Vernon Lee, Frederic George Stephens, and Virginia Woolf

This chapter examines the way in which encounters with natural surroundings have been registered in the long fin de siècle and early modernism, by comparing essays by John Ruskin, Vernon Lee, Frederic George Stephens, and Virginia Woolf. It argues that the changing relationship between the subject and the natural world was increasingly internalised and expressed within the human body, and that the genre of the essay provided a form in which such embodied perceptions could be articulated. It also aims to show how subjective sensation, aesthetic form, and environmental change intersect and redefine the relationship between the human and non-human amidst growing feelings of doubt.